The Neighbor Who Never Sleeps

She picked up the phone. She stopped the recording. She sat on the couch and scrubbed back through the footage with shaking hands.
For the first nine hours, nothing. The window across the alley. The light. The empty frame of 3F. Ordinary and still.
Then, at 2:46 a.m. on the recording — one minute before she had woken up — something moved.
Not in the window across the alley.
In the reflection of her own window. In the glass. Behind her. In her apartment.
A silhouette. Standing in the center of her living room. Arms at its sides. Perfectly still. And then, slowly, it raised one hand.
Mara stopped the video. She sat very still. The room around her was empty. The city hummed outside. The light across the alley burned on, indifferent.
She thought about the silhouette waving at her from across the alley for eleven nights. She thought about how she had always assumed it was watching her from over there.
She had never once considered that the window was simply showing her what was already here.
She did not move for a very long time. And somewhere behind her — or perhaps only in her mind, she could no longer be certain — she heard that sound again. Low. Rhythmic. Patient.
Waiting.

0 likes

About the Author

Rowan Vale — a student of occult symbolism, for whom every abandoned church is hiding something. Never leaves house without Daisy … his little doll.

— Rowan Vale

Full author profile

July 17, 2026

10min-stories